Love Letters of the Angels of Death (19 page)

Finally, the road splits. You choose the obscure exit and end up crossing a railway track, bouncing onto the gravel road leading between barbed wire gates and into an enormous garbage dump. This is the landfill we and our one million closest neighbours have been packing with our refuse. Our little car bangs in and out of the deep, sun-hardened mud ruts in the roadway. Behind the gates, you drive over the massive weigh scale – “dead slow,” the sign says. You are weighed and measured and, you have no doubt, found wanting.

And in the household refuse rubble field, at the edge of the mound of bedsprings, Chinese particle board, and black plastic, you cut the engine and step out of the car.

The air reeks like the inside of a warm, dirty refrigerator, but you sit on the edge of the hood, right out in the open anyway. The dump is patrolled by ravens too big and bearded to be mistaken for common crows. They're the kind of birds we usually only see in the mountains or way up north. You watch them tossing and tearing plastic bags with the long knives of their black beaks. You're wondering where their chicks are right now. None of the birds on the trash mounds look anything but old and hoary. Maybe there are no such thing as raven chicks, and the birds just spring to life without any infancy – incarnated fully grown from tattered black garbage bags caught in tree branches and held there, rustling through enough winters to be blown into enormous, shaggy birds.

The weary beeping of bulldozers' back-up signals sound from behind the incomprehensible trash-mountain heaped in front of our car. Some of the ravens answer back a mimicking cry. Their voices make you smile – even though you know they're carrion birds and they'd merrily strip your body down to its bare bones if you sat too still for too long.

You stay there, perched on the hood of our car parked on the sandy ground in front of the trash-mountain, until your breasts ache and harden beneath your tightly folded arms. It tingles and stings, as if you can feel each of the rough, tiny crystals that move though the glands and ducts beneath your skin. Maybe you could stay there, behind the barbed gates, until the milk runs down through the fabric of your shirt and onto your arms, along the metal curves of the car, dripping to where it would fall to darken the dirt below you. You wouldn't need to cut yourself to spill it. The milk drains out of your body all the same, through openings in your skin that you can't even see – smaller than pores. You always said your milk was so pretty – like liquefied ivory when it stood on our newborns' fuzzy cheeks. It's probably the same colour as the bones from which it was drawn – your bones, delicate and beautiful and unsee-able except for the bits of them suspended in your milk.

You'll never tell me how you thought about doing it – about sitting dead still on the hood of the car. Maybe, in time, the ravens would have forgotten what you really were – and you would have stopped worrying about it. And the birds would have come hopping toward you, moving sideways, peering at you around their broad blind spots with each of their shiny, black eyes in turn. But even if they mistook you for dead, they wouldn't have eaten you – not your flesh. They would have inched close enough to peck at the ground where your milk would have been spilt in the dirt, still warm – great, shaggy black birds swallowing, brown grit and ivory milk, all at once.

You don't stay in the city dump long enough to find out any of this. You come back to us – to the baby and me and the future full of his brothers. I hope I know why – but I can never be sure.

It's been hours since you left. Still, I don't ask any dangerous questions about where you've been. “Did you enjoy your break?” is what I decide to say in the cheerful voice I've been practicing.

Even this makes you wince. Your arms are outstretched anyway. “Give him here. He needs to eat.”

“He's not crying – ”

You're pulling at your clothes anyway. “Well,
I
need him to eat. I guess this relationship isn't quite perfectly parasitic.”

You take the baby and sit down on the couch, bending yourself into your typical, awkward nursing posture that made all the lactation consultants frown. There's a pillow across your lap, your spine is stooped so your head sits too far forward, one of your elbows is thrust out at me like a lesser-than sign, and you're offering yourself to our child.

And even through every offering you make, we both know the baby himself is not really an idol. He's just an altar – a place to lay sacrifices. The sacrifice you make here is so profound I've never dared to mention my own – real but lost and invisible in the face of the cataclysm of your new motherhood. But the look of sameness in the routine of my life is not real. I have laid something precious on the altar of the baby too. My own sacrifice – it was you.

Twenty-Two

He's stooped over the plain white sink, washing his hands from the last throat swab of the day when his receptionist leans into the exam room. “I am so sorry,” she begins, “but we've got a bit of a problem out front.”

He raises his head but doesn't look at her – he never looks directly at them. “Hm?”

“There's this – lady – sitting right up on top of the appointment desk. I'm pretty sure she's not a patient but she's come barging into the clinic right at closing, no appointment or anything, and tells me you have to see her, right now.”

“Not a patient.” He repeats it as if he already understands.

He's still wiping his hands on a paper towel as the receptionist tells him the name of Brigs's wife. Someone from their old high school class has already been into this doctor's clinic that morning for a prenatal appointment. That was where the doctor had been sitting – bent over, rubber-gloved, stunned, and penned between the stirrups of an exam table – when he first heard what happened to Brigs, a man he only met once, a man married to someone he used to love. Since then, the doctor has had this feeling, all day long, like he should be expecting a visit.

The receptionist sees the doctor's throat ripple beneath his nodding head.

“I can always send her away,” she offers. “I told her I wasn't sure if you'd left for the day or not. I can go tell her it's too late –”

“No.” He shakes his head. “It's okay. Send her into my office.”

He crosses the hall, flicks on the brass lamp his wife bought him for Father's Day, and sits down behind stacks of drug manuals, bending himself into a wheeled leather chair a lot like the one in Brigs's office. He takes in a deep breath, closes his eyes, and tips his head back as he exhales, like a meditation.

That's how Brigs's wife finds the doctor – her once and former prom date – when she comes to stand in the open doorway of his office, her feet apart, her hands on her hips. “What are we doing in here, Dan?” she's demanding.

He jolts. “Carrie – hi. This is my office, where I do counselling.”

“Well, get up,” Carrie says, lunging forward and pushing the arm of his chair hard enough to spin it a half-turn away from her. “We need to be in an exam room for this.”

As he rises, she's already twisting the knob of a numbered door in the wall beside his office. “This one will do, right?”

He's behind her. “Sure.”

“Good.” The door swings open with a bang.

“Yeah, I heard what happened – with your husband's accident. I can't begin to say how sorry I am.”

“Thanks.” She's standing in the centre of the tiny room – between the padded, papered table and another one of those tiny, white sinks – scanning the countertops as if she's looking for something.

“Hey,” he says, closing the door. “I feel like you want me to do something for you besides be sorry. But I'd rather not try to guess what it is. You can just tell me.”

“Can I?” She pulls open a drawer in the small cabinet bolted to the floor. It's one of the old ones from when the clinic was new. It's made of tin and painted with white enamel. Its top drawer is full of individually wrapped alcohol swabs and long, wooden Q-tips in sterile packages.

He doesn't interfere as she opens a second drawer. “Look, Carrie, I know you must be devastated. And I want to help you. But I can't do anything if you just keep ransacking my clinic without actually talking to me.”

She grasps the handle of the last unopened drawer in the cabinet. It doesn't move. “Locked,” she says. “This must be the right one then. Where's the key, Dan?”

“You have to tell me what you're looking for.”

She sighs and rolls her head from one shoulder to the other. “Okay, I need a good scalpel – not one of those hack jobs like they gave us to use in zoology labs back in school. I need a good one like you'd use to operate on a real person.”

He answers with a tense, unvoiced laugh.

“And I might need some advice too,” she continues. “I mean, I imagine it's probably a lot like de-boning a chicken. But I've never exactly done this sort of thing before – on a person.”

“What? You mean – surgery?” he says.

“Yes.”

That disorienting feeling she used to give him in high school is coming back to him now. Here is it again – the same almost giddy exhaustion and confusion she always trailed behind herself when it came to him. And he's defending himself against it the same way he always did in the past: by patronizing her.

He shakes his head like he's trying to wake up. “Let me get this straight: you drove all the way down here – at a time like this – so you could get me to give you a scalpel and – ” He glances down, looking right at her face. “What exactly is it you're going to do?”

They look into one another's faces for an instant, the way they never used to do when they loved each other. And if she ever loved anyone before Brigs, out of all the other boys, this was who it was – this is Brigs's forerunner. Maybe that's the real reason why she's come here, not even twenty-four hours after Brigs died. She's trying to rediscover the beginning of the way that leads back to her husband.

It happens so fast the doctor doesn't even sense that she's reached her hand out, snatching at his hand until she's already holding it in both of her own. His hand is smaller than Brigs's, over-washed, and cold. In this small town with its one doctor's office, there isn't anyone for miles who doesn't know the doctor's hand by now. For a second, he thinks she might just want what all the other widows want when they come to see him, and he closes his fingers around hers, loosely, in that clinical, comforting hold of his.

But she's tracing a line down the back of his hand, firm and straight – marking the bone that runs from his wrist to his first knuckle. “I want one these,” she says. “Not yours,” she hurries when she feels him jerking away. “I want one of these bones from Brigs's hand. Don't worry, I asked him ages ago if I could have one. He said I could take it. I'm pretty sure he said so.”

When she knows Dan understands, she drops his hand. Now that it's free, he holds his hand up under the fluorescent lights and looks for the invisible trace of the line she's drawn on his skin. “You want me to give you a scalpel and a – tutorial – so you can cut a bone out of your deceased husband's hand.”

“Yes. Well, ideally you'd come with me and cut it out of him yourself –”

He steps back, until his spine is pressed against the closed door.

“But I know that's too much to ask so – so, here I am.”

He hooks the bottom of a wheeled stool with his foot. “Sit down,” he tells her.

“I don't have a lot of time – ”

“Sit down, Carrie,” he repeats, sitting on the stool himself. She obeys and he wheels his seat over to the chair she's chosen. He leans his elbow on her chair's metal arm. “Look, everyone grieves in his or her own way. I counsel a lot of people and I've learned to respect that. I've seen some bereaved people who shut right down and can't do anything. And I've seen other people who get – manic.”

“You think I've gone crazy.”

His chin droops to his chest. “I think you're beside yourself – and understandably so. But you can't go carving up your husband for comfort. Cutting doesn't bind, it breaks. I honestly think this kind of operation couldn't possibly do anything but upset you even more. And – and it's not appropriate.”

“Appropriate – what the hell does that mean?”

“It means that people will come to the viewing and wind up having to deal with seeing his hand is all – tampered with. Someone could quite possibly call the police.”

She doesn't hesitate. “Tampered with? It's not like the organ procurement people haven't already picked though him. He hasn't exactly got pristine remains anymore. Besides, if I have him cremated, no one will ever be able to tell what has or hasn't been tampered with.”

The doctor glances over his shoulder and lowers his voice. “But the body is sacred, Carrie. You know that. We don't keep physical souvenirs of human bodies rattling around with the living.”

She sits up straight in her chair. “They do in the Philippines. Brigs had whole pages of pictures of Philippine cemeteries in his photo album. Their graveyards are full of piles of dry bones sorted into heaps – skulls over here, femurs over there. And they're just stacked up, like firewood or cannon balls, resting on top of the crypts and between the crosses.”

“But isn't that just a vestige of poverty? I mean, people might be used to it and they're making the best of it but that doesn't mean it's an ideal situation.”

She rolls her eyes. “Ethnocentric much?”

He ignores it. “And don't forget that you still have something literal left over from Brigs himself. You have all those fine heirs you produced for him.”

He's trying to be sweet – trying to make her laugh – but she throws herself backward into her chair, like she's disgusted. “Don't give me that living-on-through-his-children nonsense. The boys are not him. They're themselves. And their destiny has always been to leave me.”

The doctor sits back too, and a silent moment passes while they both hate each other. “Why don't you let me give you something to help you sleep instead?” is what he finally offers. “I can write you a prescription and you can take what you need until you're calm and rested and thinking more clearly.” He's already scrawling something on a prescription pad. He's using the same serial killer handwriting he had back in university.

“Sleeping pills do not work on me.” She's wrenching his pen away from him, throwing it over his shoulder, against the closed door. There's a tiny knock just as the pen hits the wood, as if someone has been listening from the outside, waiting to break in once they were sure Carrie had snapped. The door opens and the receptionist sticks her head inside the room.

“Everything okay?” she sings.

“Yeah, it's fine,” the doctor answers. “You can go now. We'll see you tomorrow.”

But the receptionist just stands there.

“Really. It's okay. Please go.”

She leaves but the door stays ajar.

Carrie jumps to her feet and slams the door. She's spinning around, pulling at the locked drawer again, asking, “So, would it be better for me to cut in first at the wrist or at the knuckle – or in between?”

The doctor sighs and shakes his head.

She kicks at the cabinet hard enough to leave a dent in its side. “I don't need you for this, you know. I'm still a very resourceful girl and I could get this done with nothing but a razor blade from my toolbox, flashbacks from zoology class, and what would probably amount to some pretty gruesome trial and error.”

The doctor has spun his stool around to look at her. “Just snip off a lock of his hair – ”

“Not good enough.”

“Or a sliver of his fingernail – ”

“Gross.”

“Carrie – ”

“No, keep going, Dan. You're getting closer. The next thing is to suggest I pull out one of his teeth.”

The doctor sighs again and runs both of his hands through his own hair. He pulls back, shocked, when he feels her hand in his hair too. Carrie is standing right next to him and she's teased out one short, white lock from the rest of the dark brown strands. “Look at it,” she says in a moan. “Your hair – it really is getting grey.”

He looks up as she drops her hand away. “Don't do it,” he says. “I'm asking you – please. Don't cut him. You can't lawfully do it. It says so right in the Criminal Code.”

“But the bone – all that time – it was him, it was mine, wasn't it? And even now, isn't it still mine?” And that's when she starts to cry. He's been waiting for it – almost wishing for it – but it hits him right in the guts anyway.

She sits down on the floor of the exam room, her knees bent up to her eye level, sobbing, with both her palms pressed against her eyelids.

And the doctor is nodding and patting her knee in a familiar, doctor-ly pantomime of compassion. But then she's sliding away, rising to kneel on the dingy white tiles at his feet. He sits back, gaping down at the head of blonde hair slumped against the side of his leg. He's not sure if it's real but he thinks he might be able to smell something – sweet like the rosewater she used to dab in her hair when she was his.

“Please,” she begs against his shin.

“Carrie – come on, now. Get up. Carrie – Caroline – don't.”

“Please, Dan – please. Help me. I can't risk ending up with nothing.”

She's sobbing too hard to hear his last sigh – the one where he empties his lungs right down to their tidal volume. He glances up at the exam room door to make sure it's firmly latched before he takes a small key from the ring in his pocket, leans toward the cabinet, and unlocks the one drawer she couldn't open. And then he's on his knees too, down on the floor in front of her, pushing her upright, gripping her wrist, pulling her hand away from her face. He's holding something wrapped in a small, stiff rectangle of heavy, sterile foil. He's pressing it into her palm, finally ready to make the offering.